A couple of years ago I started, and failed to complete a ‘Photo 365′, where I attempted to take a photo everyday. I failed to complete the year, as after I’d missed the odd day it soon became easy to just give up totally.

In 2012 I decided to revisit this with a difference. I’m trying to publish a new picture each day on my Flickr page.

A lot of these pictures will be older pictures, my idea being to give me a chance to publish some of the many pictures I have taken over the years.

Then at the end of each month I plan to post on my site here a review of the months pictures with a commentary on the pictures, this being the January review.

Jan 01

The interior of the BBC Quay House at Media City UK, looking down from the top floor.

Jan 02

I originally snapped this one just to show the apparent 7 hour train delay, however if you ignore the actual content of the board I like the picture with the trees and sky. This is the first you’ll see of my ongoing theme of sky and clouds in pictures.

Jan 03

Another train station themed picture, with the same theme of the trees and sky.

Jan 04

This one was taken in the early evening in late Autumn, I like the lighting on this one, with the mixture of sun and shadows. I think there is a nice composition of traditional pub building, and the modern road.

Jan 05

Not the best photo in the world taken on my camera phone, however the slight graininess nicely mirrors the analogue nature of the machinery of these cart machines.

Jan 06

A result of wiling away a few minutes playing with the Photoshop Express Android App – despite it’s Photoshop name it’s not really a photo editor, more of a collection of fixed filters and effects.

Jan 07

The first of a couple taken in Blackpool last year. This one from the end of Central Pier, spot my favoured sky against a menacing sea – a typical Blackpool summer day!

Jan 08

A view towards the Tower.

Jan 09

A nice effect on this one with the foreground in focus and blurred computer screen .

Jan 10

Sign at Wythenshawe Forum – one of my less favourite pictures from the collection, at this point I was scratching around for something to upload for this date.

Jan 11

This is a picture from a couple of years ago, a snow covered train track on the approach to Oldham Werneth station. Nice colours in this pictures.

Jan 12

The Wheel of Manchester on a miserable January day.

Jan 13

Continue on a theme – around a year before the previous photo I took this picture of the Capital FM Routemaster bus in Piccadilly in Manchester.

Jan 14

Multicoloured ‘slinky’ toy under neon lighting.

Jan 15

Another from the collection of pictures I took before the closure of the Oldham Loop line. Nice contract of sign and brickwork in this picture.

Jan 16

The first of a series of sport stadia linked pictures. Here a temporary radio studio set-up at football ground (can you identify the football club?)

Jan 17

There is a vague sport stadium link in this one. Taken from the roof of the Salford Lads Club. Nice clouds yet again on this (the vague sport link is Old Trafford in the distance.)

Jan 18

A somewhat less glamorous sport ground, The Whitebank Stadium.

Jan 19

Another glowing toy.

Jan 20

The beach at Rhyl, North Wales – continuing my love of cloud formations.

Jan 21

Wythenshawe Forum Centre – drawing an interesting comparison to this 70′s picture .

Jan 22

A panoramic photo of Media City UK at Salford Quays, stitched together in Photoshop from several individual photos.

Jan 23

For some reason I feel like titling this one ‘simples’ .

Jan 24

Washford transmitting station.

Jan 25

“Caution Radio Transmitters Operating” – one on my theme of signs, again at Washford.

Jan 26

Another view of radio transmitting aerials.

Jan 27

No prizes for guessing this is an older picture. Nice autumn view in Tandle Hill Country Park.

Jan 28

The summit at Tandle Hill – great mostly clear blue sky.

Jan 29

Peacock at Heaton Park..

Jan 30

Another phone snap for the amusement of extra signage to ‘press to exit’.

Jan 31

Heaton Park, grass and clouds yet again.

Lets start with the formalities and wish you all the best for the 2012, if you’re watching this site like an hawk then you should read this just in time for the New Year in the UK (please provide your own Auld Lang Syne music, but you can have the fireworks display above.) If you happen to reading this in the middle of July in which case ignore this first paragraph.

I titled this ‘Things have changed around here’ as I’ve taken the opportunity of the Christmas break to make a few tweaks to this website. Most of this has taken the form of me twiddling with the code in the background, learning all about child themes in WordPress and their pitfalls , so there’s only a few things you’ll notice as an end user which I highlight below.

The main idea is when accessing the site via your desktop to use front page to highlight some of the more ‘in depth’ pieces that I’ve written, allowing the other bits to be a little less ‘in your face’.

What is new if you access the site via a mobile phone browser you should see a ‘iOS app style’ interface which lists all the blog posts in a more mobile friendly style.

Naturally if you read my content via the RSS feed in something such as Google Reader you’ll continue to just get my new blog posts as they are posted. Talking of google in the main desktop version of the post pages there is now Google+1 buttons as well as Tweet buttons.

Finally to note in my introduction to 2012, back in 2010 I did a ‘Photo 365′ experiment, where I took a picture everyday and published it on Flickr - where I failed miserably part way through the year. In 2012 I’m going to repeat the exercise, with a twist of just posting a new picture everyday, which could be contemporary or from my personal photo archives of pictures I’ve taken over the past few years.

Those of a certain technical bent will be familiar with the concept of of the ‘hello world’ exercise when learning a new programming language or technique. Thus many moons after signing up for twitter, I’m going to try and actually use it a little bit.

Thus if I’ve clicked all the correct buttons, downloaded all the correct software and inserted all the correct codes my first tweet should be a ‘hello world’ announcement linking to this blog posting. Not only that but any future blog posts I make should be tweeted in the same way – thus guaranteeing me sending some tweets without ever needing to go to touch a twitter client (though strictly speaking that’s not true as philedmonds.com is now registered as a twitter app.)

Rather spookily I’d been reading some things about nice new things in the upcoming WordPress version 3.1, such as in this post and others which I have failed miserably to make a note of (too much WILF’ing was going on at the time). Then last night when I was tweaking one of the other WordPress powered sites I have a hand in the ‘upgrade to WordPress v3.1′ message magically appeared in by admin Dashboard.

We’ll after my text this afternoon to my local WordPress guru of “have you updated your sites to WordPress 3.1″ was “I hadn’t seen that news” I thought I’d throw caution to the wind and upgrade this site.

So far so good – it still works!

The most obvious change is the ‘admin bar’ at the top of the screen when you are logged in but browsing the site. It also interesting to see developments in native support for custom post types (which I’ve previously achieved via plug-ins) which along with streamlined admin pages are going to make for some tense moments with some sites I’m involved with – I see some late nights tweaking on a development server is in order. (Shh… don’t tell the family).

If all else fails this new release has prompted a new blog post from me (assuming you didn’t notice my ‘test’ posts which stayed live a little longer than I’d planned while I was testing my custom XML-RPC scripts).

So what to do with this website after much server and configuration tweaks to make the site run smooth, while all the time the reader get a promise of great things to come.

First question to ask is what are my aims of running this as a blog site?

One is definitely a technical exercise, slightly inspired by panellist Dr Ron from a tech podcast I regularly listen to. I want to learn more about the WordPress platform in a non mission critical situation. Unless I suddenly get a unexpected cult following I’m not going to lose sleep at night if I break this site conducting a ‘science experiment’ as Dr Ron might describe it.

Second is as a platform to share various things on my mind – things that I’d probably not go to the effort of making a traditional web page about. My Phil.Edmonds.net site suffers from minimal updates, and I want to focus that site more on static information, particularly focusing on some archive materials, as historic information is what is mainly on that site.

What about topics to post about?

A blog I read often is that of the self proclaimed ‘radio futurologist’ James Cridland, mainly because of the prime subject, radio and the internet is of particular interest to me. He also used to post about beer but then decided to move this into another site, as not to dilute the credibility of his main blog.

This moving of the beer posts is a shame. Now I am more than happy to consume a pint of cheap and cheerful Moss Side’s finest Amber Necter*, despite sporting a beard you won’t find me carrying a CAMRA membership card, but given the right time and place I quite enjoy sampling something different. I enjoyed reading James’ beer postings once in a while when they came as an unexpected extra, but I never bother going off and reading his dedicated beer blog.

So focusing on just one topic is not something that I’m worried about, so varied subjects are fine by me.

So what topics will I post on?

Radio and radio technology on a grass roots level is an obvious one. Though I can’t promise the great insights of Mr Cridland and the quality writing and analysis of the likes of Paul Easton.

IT. I’m for ever amassing little tricks and tips as I deal with many and varied computing systems, it’ll be good for myself to keep a note of useful things. For issues where “someone else” hasn’t had exactly the same problem putting it online for the benefit of others can only be a good thing to do.

Finally I am, rather slowly, going through my years of collected recordings and other radio stuff from my “anorak” collection. I’m pondering on how best to publish some of this on-line. There’s certainly pros for publishing this via a blog for the benefit of interested parties who want to follow via an RSS feed. However if this fits in better on a separate site I’m unsure. So jury is out on this one for now.

*This being my standing comment that round these parts “Australia’s Famous Beer” (their slogan not mine) Fosters is actually “brewed in the EU” – most likely at the Scottish & Newcastle brewery in downtown Manchester.